RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Did he tell you about the bacterium? Did he tell you about that? I assume that even a flunky in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be able to tell you about the germ.
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What germ?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’ll tell you what germ, the bug they sent us up here to gather for them. There’s a bacterium up here, on Mars, and they think that it has military applications, and I don’t give a damn if they are reading this entire exchange, because I’m going to tell the truth now, and the truth is that they don’t intend for this to be a scientific mission and they never did intend for it to be. This bacterium is so top-secret that the majority of us on the mission didn’t even know about it. And it’s incredibly deadly. No one on Earth will have any resistance to it, since it has existed on Mars for however many millions of years. This germ is so powerful that it made it impossible for any life to take hold here, because what it does is completely wipe out higher life-forms.
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Now you’re really sounding totally paranoid, because from what I’ve heard, the only supposedly military application any bacteria farming is going to have is not military but commercial, and it has to do with some new way of making microchips, and the reason why they are concentrating on microchips is that they managed to defray some of the costs of the mission with underwriting from tech machinery manufacturers.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t believe everything you hear. It gets more and more dangerous here every day, and I believe I have seen one or two of the astronauts who are already infected with the bacterium. Don’t even ask. It will all become clear soon enough. I am just hoping to get out of here with my own skin, though I don’t have any real hope that I’m going to be able to do that. I’ve been spending weeks up here doing nothing but drugging myself, that’s all I’ve been doing. I have myself righteously addicted. It started with the missing finger, and the reattachment. You can’t even believe how horrible my hand looks. It looks like it was rescued from some Frankenstein movie, and then there’s the stump from the middle finger. And it was really bothering me, as you’d imagine, and I was having a lot of phantom pains, and I started taking morphine for it, and then I was just unable to stop, and all the synthetic pain relievers, I mean, once I ran through the morphine, I started taking the lower-level painkillers, and they weren’t enough and I had to double up, and sometimes I am so high for so long that I don’t know what day it is, and I don’t know if that’s really the best way to be operating a nuclear power facility. Wait, wait a second. Just for one second, okay? Stay with me for a moment? I think there’s someone at the door.
April 30, 2026
The chase began in the desert, as many compelling chases do, and it involved giving up the succor of any remaining comfort. As always with a proper manhunt, it was not always clear who was hunter and who was prey. This I managed to learn from the hapless Steve Watanabe, who, so attuned to the possibility that he would somehow fail to make it home, was now providing round-the-clock updates on everything that was happening around him to the authorities. As if this would be enough to preserve his sorry ass. He was able, using tracking satellites designed by the authorities, to perform round-the-clock global-positioning updates on the space suits of Mars mission astronauts, exploiting not only heat signatures but a space suit design feature that had been built in for good reasons: reflectors. Steve was somewhat prepared, therefore, for the coming of Jim Rose. And he anticipated hand-to-hand combat, as well as all registers of high-tech pursuit and entrapment, even if he suspected the endgame would rely on kinds of violence better known to earlier epochs of human history. Above all, he advised Brandon Lepper, a guy he had always disliked, to take advantage of the pause before the storm to move himself farther out of harm’s way.
According to Brandon, there was nothing to worry about. According to Brandon, the integrity of NASA’s long-term goals — terraforming, resource exploitation, a permanent human colony on Mars — had long since been jeopardized by José. Brandon had no choice but to do what had to be done. Likewise the Debbie Quartz incident. Debbie was nice enough, sure, but she was unprepared for what was required, for the Darwinism of the Mars mission, and he’d proved it by just talking sternly to her. She had to go.
Steve Watanabe, when he heard these enfeebled rationalizations, which have been much fleshed out in my account, felt that Brandon was not himself. There was no gratitude for his having made a drive of many days on a forklift. And Steve was not reassured by the dull, lifeless tone with which Brandon directed him to the grinding and milling tools. They were to drill in the eastern outflow channel of the Valles Marineris, technically known by another one of those creepy Greek names, the Ius Chasma. The Ius Chasma, you’ll recall, is about three and a half miles beneath the plains into which it is carved, running parallel to it the Tithonium Chasma, which gets so narrow it’s just like a big crack in the ground, except that the crack goes down miles. Between the two is a ridge that runs along the center. Ius is about four hundred miles long, but it’s only a tiny portion of the enormous Valles Marineris complex, which I have already said is about as far across as the United States. In most of it, you wouldn’t even know you were in a canal. Not so here at Ius. You see a canyon wall that’s miles high, you don’t forget it.
Steve and Brandon had got down twenty-five feet or so, into the bottom of one of the chasm walls, and they were digging mostly into basalt. These were the kinds of environments, however, according to the Martian surveillance satellites, where you found salt beds and, in some cases, dampness. The evolving theory — that there were periodic underground aquifers that had in the past caused catastrophic flooding on Mars — provided for, indeed required, spots of dampness. That water had to carve out those canyons somehow, and it wasn’t all evaporated. It couldn’t be. A team of geologists back in Florida watching all of this on a video screen cheered for every new foot of exposed crust. Much of this work, excepting the occasional buzz and roar of drilling automata, was done in silence and darkness. Steve, according to the notes he was posting, tried to engage Brandon periodically, but Brandon would no longer participate in the subtler human interactions. Brandon, former boxer and smartass, had, in the weeks alone, become a grim, silent wraith. When there was a lapse in the pace of operations, he would berate Steve until Steve was willing to get back to work, and the only thing that Steve could seem to do to get time off was to faint from exertion, which he did periodically. The deprivation of sunlight in the chasm was somehow even more obliterating than he imagined it might be on Earth, since it was the last thing he felt he had in common with those he missed back home: sunlight.
They had a rope-and-pulley system that led down into the godforsaken hole in the ground, and a heat lamp that they used to keep warm, and they ran it off the battery of the rover, via reinforced extension cord, and there was a small generator, and it was in this half-light that Steve saw Brandon’s grimy face, as Brandon pulled off his visor and attempted to taste the salt they were blasting away from the walls of the excavation site in a storage drum. Brandon tasted it. There was some kind of liquid there, undeniably, and the action of the drills, the friction of it, was liquefying some of what was frozen.